Dell XPS 13 9345 (X1E80100) – Audio stack investigation on Ubuntu 25.10

Project Discussion Ubuntu Architectures
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I’ve been investigating audio behavior on the Dell XPS 13 9345 (Snapdragon X Elite) and wanted to share my findings in case they help with hardware enablement.

Ubuntu Version: 25.10 ARM64 (kernel 6.17.0‑7‑generic)

Desktop Environment: GNOME (not relevant to the issue)

Problem Description: Attempting to enable audio on the Dell XPS 13 9345 (Snapdragon X Elite X1E80100). The audio stack partially initializes: the WSA codecs power on and I hear a brief activation crackle, but playback fails immediately afterward. No audio output is produced.

Relevant System Information:

  • Dell XPS 13 9345
  • Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E80100
  • linux‑firmware package + Qualcomm audio blobs extracted from Windows 11 placed under /lib/firmware/qcom/x1e80100/audio/

Error Messages / Logs: Example from dmesg:

ASoC: no backend DAIs enabled for MultiMedia1 Playback

Manual playback tests:

  • hw:0,0 → EINVAL
  • hw:0,1 → brief crackle, then EIO

What I’ve Tried:

  • Verified machine driver loads correctly (X1E80100-Dell-XPS-13-9345)
  • Confirmed DSP firmware boots (gprsvc nodes visible in debugfs)
  • Confirmed SoundWire enumeration (4 speakers: L/R woofer + L/R tweeter)
  • Confirmed mixer controls exist (RX/WSA DMA mixers)
  • Created Dell‑specific UCM2 profile under ucm2/conf.d/
  • Attempted manual mixer activation (RX_CODEC_DMA_RX_0 and WSA_CODEC_DMA_RX_0)
  • Attempted direct playback via speaker-test
  • Verified topology loads but backend DAIs never activate

Current Behavior: The audio stack initializes partially, but playback fails due to missing backend DAI routing. This appears to be a topology mismatch for this specific Dell model.

Simply posting this in case it can be of any use for future development for this device in the community.

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This is a known limitation of the Snapdragon X Elite laptops … while you can make audio output via the speakers work through some devicetree hacking, there is no speaker protection in the stack yet which means you can easily blow up your onboard speakers by accidentially pushing the volume above 100%

Instructions on how to make the speakers work anyway (if you are brave enough) can be found in the megathread about the X Elite images:

I personally decided to better wait and simply live with headphones for the time being on my XPS until the stack is fully working …

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